Financial Services

Financial service cooperatives are composed of credit unions, banks within the farm credit system, mutual insurance companies, and a variety of financing organizations that lend to cooperative firms and banks. Table 4-4 shows that 8,627 of the 50,330 financial service cooperatives in the U.S. provided us with data. These "reporting" cooperatives account for $2.8T in assets, $265B in revenue, 376,000 jobs and $13B in wages. There are 325 million members, which as we noted previously, grossly overstates the total number of unique members within this aggregate sector. For example, many of the 91 million credit union members are also likely members of a mutual insurer.

We report only on firms for which we have collected economic data (some firms did not respond to our requests for information), so that these numbers represent lower bounds regarding the full economic footprint of cooperatives in this aggregate sector. As we described in the previous section, we extrapolated to the full population for our impact analysis. As a consequence, the sum of direct impacts in the following subsections will be larger than the corresponding aggregate variables reported here.